Hokkaido University Builds Japan’s Largest Academic Cloud Using Cloud.com

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cloud.com, a provider of open source cloud computing software, today announced that Hokkaido University, one of the most influential academic organizations in advanced IT technology in Japan, is using Cloud.com’s flagship technology, CloudStack, to power the university’s public cloud offering. To establish the academic cloud in Hokkaido University, Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT) is providing total system integration with supercomputing, blade server and storage platforms that enable all university researchers in Japan with access to academic computing and technology resources.

“Working with the Japan-based university reaffirms our commitment to the Asia-Pacific region, and the traction we have seen in the Japanese market in the last six months has been astounding. We look forward to continuing to expand in this region.”

“The university was looking for a cost-effective new way for researchers to create, store, and exchange academic contents and to develop experimental systems for their research projects. By choosing to move our existing infrastructure to the cloud, information is now readily available for our researchers,” said Dr. Masaharu Munetomo, associate professor in the Information Initiative Center at Hokkaido University. “Through the collaboration with Hitachi, Ltd., we chose CloudStack because of its open source structure and innovation, in addition to its ability to deliver the capability to build and deploy this compute cloud, the first of its kind in Japan.”

The rapid growth of the cloud computing market is creating new opportunities and models to improve IT utilization. Hokkaido University has implemented CloudStack on top of the Citrix XenServer hypervisor and is enabling an integrated cloud solution for provisioning, management and operation of IT resources from a unified portal. In addition to creating a more agile, on-demand environment for consuming IT resources, this new cloud offering reduces operational cost and power consumption per server by up to 20 percent, making for a greener IT department.

“We are pleased to work with Hokkaido University and help them build Japan’s largest academic cloud. Cloud.com is focused on making the task of building a cloud simple, thus enabling IT organizations to free up human resources,” said Sheng Liang, founder and CEO of Cloud.com. “Working with the Japan-based university reaffirms our commitment to the Asia-Pacific region, and the traction we have seen in the Japanese market in the last six months has been astounding. We look forward to continuing to expand in this region.”

By establishing the academic cloud system, Hitachi, Ltd. is providing total system integration with leading-edge technologies such as HITACHI SR16000, high performance and high reliability supercomputing, Hitachi Compute Blade 2000, blade server, and Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family, state of the art storage platform, as well as maintenance and delivery of the Cloud.com CloudStack to Hokkaido University. Hitachi expertise in the cloud computing market, coupled with the company’s key relationships with cloud innovators, make it the best partner to help implement the CloudStack at Hokkaido University. Furthermore, because of its intimate knowledge of IT requirements across the Japanese market, Hitachi enables Hokkaido University to reduce costs while accelerating the deployment of its academic cloud.

Recognizing that organizations currently face a daunting task when trying to build their own IaaS cloud environment, Cloud.com provides customers with the fastest path to owning their own cloud by providing the latest and the most advanced software platform for building highly scalable, highly reliable cloud computing environments. Cloud.com currently enables over 50 large-scale production clouds in deployment that have been built on its market-leading open source cloud computing solution including KT, Nokia Research Center, Tata Communications, GreenQloud and Logicworks. Cloud.com technologies can be deployed on-premise or as hosted cloud services.

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About Hokkaido University

Hokkaido University, founded in 1876, is one of the oldest national universities in Japan with approximately 2,000 faculties, 10,000 undergraduate and 6,000 graduate students. The university has 18 graduate schools and 29 research institutes and centers which lead academic research projects. Last year, prof. Akira Suzuki, professor emeritus of the university, won the Nobel prize in chemistry 2010. Information initiative center (IIC) of the university is one of the Japanese national supercomputing center, which provides supercomputing, cloud computing, and networking services to all the universities in Japan. The university’s website is http://www.hokudai.ac.jp/en/

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2010 (ended March 31, 2011) consolidated revenues totaled 9,315 billion yen ($112.2 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

About Cloud.com

Open source software provider Cloud.com simplifies and accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of multi-tier and multi-tenant private and public cloud services. Cloud.com’s CloudStack software is being used to provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in production environments at leading enterprises and service providers, providing them with exceptional stability, and is unrivaled in both feature breadth and scalability. Founded in 2008 by leaders in open source, virtualization and infrastructure development, Cloud.com is backed by leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms. For more information, go to www.cloud.com.